Spy hacking group targeting Asian governments spotted

There is a newly discovered hacking group that has been spying on governments in the Asian region since 2009. The group has been unveiled in Microsoft's latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR), which you can download on this link.

Announcing the discovery in a blog post on the Microsoft website, security director Tim Rains says the group was dubbed PLATINUM. It has conducted “several cyber espionage campaigns since 2009” focusing on targets associated with governments and similar organisations in southeast Asia.

Besides PLATINUM, SIR also covers protecting cloud accounts. In its “Protecting Identities in the Cloud: Mitigating Password Attacks” section, it talks about all the measures it does to prevent account compromise inside its cloud services.

According to Rains, this is the first time Microsoft has published data like this in a Security Intelligence Report.

Volume 20 of the Security Intelligence Report is the latest in a 10-year long history of these reports. So far, the company has published more than 12,500 pages of threat intelligence, Rains says, as well as more than a 100 blog posts, countless videos and thousands of customer briefings all over the world.

“This new volume of the report includes threat data from the second half of 2015 as well as longer term trend data on industry vulnerabilities, exploits, malware, and malicious websites,” he adds.